America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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even when interrupted in his full passion of creation, shouldn’t be too natural.
Fenton and I both looked at the brickbat where it lay guiltily in the dust, and before long he was able to sing again; but I stayed frightened about myself. I didn’t go back to my wad of putty.
Two years later, when we were twelve and I came on this midsummer visit to Marshall, Fenton had become a journalist. His father had given him a printing press and the use of a small vacant warehouse. There, with village-boy subordinates, he had established a newspaper, The Early Bird, two cents a copy; and in Indianapolis I had received and admired a sample of every previous week’s issue. Fenton wouldn’t allow me to unpack my trunk, he was so eager to show me The Early Bird newspaper office, and himself and his subeditors, who were also printers, in action. When we got there, though, I was somewhat dashed.
Across the middle of the floor, from one end wall to the other, ran an old wooden balustrade, apparently to exclude the public—and the public, I learned at once, consisted of me. On the other side of the balustrade, Fenton and his assistants immediately busied themselves with the printing press, with their desks, pencils, and paper, shouting crisp orders at one another, setting up an elaborate professional bustle, and leaving me to contemplate a pasteboard sign, keep out, hung over my side of the balustrade! Without knowing it, I was filling the function of audience, and the efforts I made to become something better weren’t encouraged. When finally, leaning plaintively over the railing, I asked if I couldn’t even be elected or appointed one of the newsboys to deliver the paper to subscribers, nobody seemed to hear me. Then, as I persisted, I was requested not to make so much noise.
“Can’t you see we’re awful busy here?” Fenton said. “We got to get our paper out day after tomorrow, don’t we? You get to look on, don’t you? My goodness!”
When suppertime came, six o’clock in Marshall, I was still the public and, as we walked home, responded but feebly to Fenton’s bright descriptions of editorial life. The next morning, however, he helped me to finish unpacking my trunk and surprised me by becoming warmly interested when I removed therefrom the dramatis personae of Punch and Judy.
“My goodness, Boothie! You can’t make ’em talk, can you?”
I manipulated the puppets—Punch, Judy, their baby, the policeman, the devil, the crocodile—the whole cast—made them all talk.
“Hi!” Fenton shouted. “We’ll give a show! We’ll give a show the whole town of Marshall’ll come to! Three cents admission! Hi!”
“Where?” I asked. “I haven’t got any place where I can set up my Punch-and-Judy show.”
“We got the best place in the world for our show, Boothie! The Early Bird office! First show tonight! Let’s go!”
We went, and, with the help of the staff, The Early Bird office was energetically made into an auditorium. The balustrade was carried out into the warehouse yard; benches for the audience were improvised; the desks were shoved into corners, and so was the printing press after being used to produce a Punch-and-Judy handbill. Lanterns, candles, and coal-oil lamps were procured and, immediately after supper that night, the courthouse yard and the square were shrill with the voices of ex-editors and printers.
First Night
“Everybody come!” they shouted. “Right this way to The Early Bird office, to see the great Punch-and-Judy show! Step fast, laydeez and gentlemun; the great Early Bird Punch-and-Judy show’s about to begin! Three cents admission for each and every one—only three cents admission for each and all!”
Within the close walls of my theater, a tall box sided with calico, I was busy arranging the puppets in the order of their appearance when I heard a trampling of full-grown feet upon the warehouse floor and the proclamations of Fenton outside: “Kindly step right in, laydeez and gentlemun! There is room for each and all at three cents apiece. Kindly take your places inside, please, without noise and confusion, on account of the Punch-and-Judy show’s about to commence!” Then I heard his voice closer, “Kindly each and all sit down, please, without noise and confusion, laydeez and gentlemun. I will now start the show! Punch and Judy, are you ready?”
Responding, I quacked out the demoniac laughter of Punch and made the puppet appear, bowing, in the opening just over my head—to a surprising amount of applause. Punch and Judy can seldom have had a more appreciatively mirthful audience and, flattered, I made the show as long as I could. When I came forth from my enclosure, damp with exertions and the warm summer night, the last of our patrons, almost all adult, were laughing as they clumped away down the wooden sidewalk—and Fenton and his staff had yielded to money madness. We had taken in a dollar and forty-seven cents.
Tragedy in Two Acts
This sum was of course to be shared equally among us, but even so we were all prosperous, and computations already being shouted proved that the future glittered before us with gold as good as in our pockets. We couldn’t do Punch and Judy again that night because Marshall went early to bed, but we could give our show every other night from then on unendingly, with a dollar and forty-seven cents as the least possible intake for every performance—the audience had been that enthusiastic! Ten nights would mean fourteen dollars and seventy cents; a hundred nights would bring us a hundred and forty-seven dollars, a sum dumfounding—but there were the figures that proved it was coming to us, and who could deny mathematics? Slightly insane with our certain riches, we went home to bed, babbling of intended purchases.
Again on the following evening thin voices sounded through the dusk of the courthouse yard and the square, “Right this way, laydeez and gentlemun, for the great Punch-and-Judy show! Step fast, laydeez and gentlemun! Only three cents admission for each and all, so hurry; the great Punch-and-Judy show’s about to begin!” Tremulous, I stood in my calico enclosure listening for the feet of the undoubted multitude.
These feet didn’t arrive, and one by one the heralds, appealing hurtly in the darkness, returned to the small warehouse. Punch and Judy played to an audience of three dumbly gum-chewing little children—nine cents—and the next night business fell off precisely that much. We waited and waited and waited, drooping about outside our lamplighted door, hearing ironical katydids, and looking up and down the dim night of the empty village street for at least a single patron. None appeared—a mystery inexplicable until our sunken minds slowly absorbed the fact: except the three children at our second performance, everybody in Marshall with three cents to spend on a show had been there the first night. There weren’t any more.
The Early Bird had died too. In one day the theater had so wrecked the newspaper and printing establishment that even the thought of a restoration was laborious; the poor old balustrade remained among weeds in the warehouse yard, a reproachful relic.
Perhaps if I hadn’t brought the Punch-and-Judy show to Marshall, Fenton might later have worn the ink-stains of an editor instead of the frown and gown of a judge. As for me, I think the exploded dazzle of Punch and Judy in Marshall did me, too, a service. Twenty years later, when a play of mine gave me a great warm-hearted audience for my first First Night, I didn’t trust it.
IV. Trousers Transition
Turned twelve I had a long mortification, involving sufferings never comprehended by my parents. Sympathetic in all other matters, indulgent beyond what their means afforded, they were, nevertheless, merely amused whenever I strove to make plain to them the special bitterness that was eating me. Among all the weaknesses of my character, as I now examine it, I find my twelve-year-old excitement about what was on my inconsequent legs to be one of the most humiliatingly revelatory. I wasn’t mortified by the dunderhead exhibitions I made of myself in the schoolroom; I wasn’t mortified by the disgraceful statistics reported by the teachers on damning cards sent to my parents after examinations; I wasn’t mortified by the batting of my eyes and fluctuations of my nose and ears in public, or by my throat’s clucking and glunking at people when I tried to talk to them. No; custom had dulled me to these inevitabilities—so I regarded them—and what made me so ashamed that I didn’t see how I could bear to go on living, unless I could effect a change, was the fact that I still wore knee breeches.